


Tomorrow's Backstory

by abeillle



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Galaxy Garrison, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-19
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-09-09 17:28:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8902762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abeillle/pseuds/abeillle
Summary: Pidge doesn’t like what she finds.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I've always had a headcanon kicking around that Pidge and Kieth go way back, so here it is. I took a lot of liberties with this, but as always, feel free to point out any glaring inaccuracies. It's been a while since I watched the show!
> 
> I've written that Lance has a crush on Keith, but it really isn't explored whatsoever, and this is not a story about Lance, so the relationship is untagged. Heads up if you're not about that, I guess.

It starts when Lance, bored and waiting for his nails to dry, tells Pidge about a fight he saw at lunch. She’d skipped meatloaf monday to nap before Intro to Astrophysics, a decision Lance is determined to make her regret.

“You should’ve seen him,” he tells her. “It was some next level stuff. Hunk, back me up here.”

Hunk is preoccupied with Lance’s bottle of polish, but he sets it down on Pidge’s nightstand. “He was a pretty amazing fighter,” he admits. “But it was him against a bunch of guards. He went down bad.”

“What’d he do?” asks Pidge.

“I don’t really know,” says Hunk. “I didn’t see how it started.”

“It probably doesn’t take much, what with just went down on Kerberos,” muses Lance.

“Who was he?” Pidge interjects, turning away from her homework. This is interesting.

“Keith Kogane,” says Lance. The look on his face is indescribable. “He’s a pilot. What a guy. I saw him doing yoga or something in the training room earlier.”

“The duality of man,” mutters Hunk.

Pidge is silent. The funny thing is, she already knows plenty about Keith. He’s aggressive, moody, intelligent, socially impaired, and incredibly pretty; a grab-bag of characteristics which somehow combine into Lance’s perfect storm.

It’s undeniable. She sits in first period and watches Lance valiantly pretend not to be watching Keith, she stands in the front row of the bleachers and sees Lance turn crimson when he’s paired with Keith in gym class, she waits a few beats before knocking on Lance’s already-open door and catches Lance staring at a dogeared page in his yearbook with a pencil sticking out of his mouth and an unbearably fond expression on his face.

Pidge can understand the reasons for Lance’s attraction to Keith. What she doesn’t get is the attraction itself. Bored in class, she watches Keith ignore his history text and flick through a battered pilot’s manual with the self-assuredness of a masterchef reading a cookbook for amateurs. She knows she should feel -- something -- when she notices Keith’s pretty, slim hands, or the way he absentmindedly tucks a strand of dark hair behind one ear.

Keith is attractive, but Pidge feels no attraction towards him. She tries to see him the way Lance does, but it feels wrong. When she looks at Keith’s mouth she can only muster up enough intrigue as to wonder what it might say, what he might reveal. 

Lance doesn’t seem to view Keith differently, when he hears about the fight. That was a given, anyway. Pidge expected that.

\-----

What she doesn’t expect, the morning after the incident, is to find Lance staring sullenly at Keith’s pointedly empty seat in Military History.

A suspension? It seems unlikely to Pidge; Keith’s transgressions, at face value, didn’t rank any higher than misdemeanours, nowhere near enough to merit such a punishment. A regular, garden variety fight took place every other week. So by all means Keith should be back.

And yet, two weeks later, Lance is still moping, Keith has failed to show up for a single class, and the gears in Pidge’s head have begun to turn. The instructor promotes Lance to the position of Pilot, and Lance begins to pretend he and Keith were sworn rivals in some convoluted attempt to save face. Pidge, who knows foul play when she sees it, hacks into an administrator account for the first time in over a year.

Pidge doesn’t like what she finds. She _never_ does, that’s what irks her about the Garrison; every despicable secret she uncovers in its database leads her to two more, like some horrible, informatic hydra, but Keith’s case is something different entirely. For starters, there’s enough holes in it to strain pasta. There’s missing paperwork left, right, and center, and half the documents that should logically be there are not. The paltry information she does find is sloppy and vague.

For two nights she picks through it, dissatisfied, unable to glean any meaning from it, until on the third night she thinks to assess the gaps in the data instead.

It’s her first breakthrough. She makes a list of what’s been left out, and she begins to see a pattern. The student rulebook has a section on suspensions and expulsions, and it maintains very clearly that the student in question and all associated staff must testify honestly before action is taken. The Garrison has conveniently neglected to record these testimonies. Keith’s side of the story is simply not there, in fact, most of his data file’s been destroyed or corrupted beyond legibility. Chewed up by digital mice. Pidge seethes.

Her second breakthrough occurs when she considers that Keith, like herself, might have known more than he should about Kerberos. Sure, he’s a pilot, but he’s not dumb, and Pidge is willing to bet there are other ways to uncover Garrison secrets than by hacking.

She remembers Keith’s talent for martial arts and his penchant for knives. It’s not very difficult to imagine how he may have done it. She lies in her bunk and neglects sleep in favour of thinking about Keith holding a sentry by the collar, a blade gripped in one pretty hand. She wonders just how much Keith knows.

She falls asleep in the simulator the next day, but a nebulous plan begins to coalesce in her mind.

\-----

The plan goes like this: on Tuesday night, Pidge will sneak out of the Garrison and trek a few kilometers North to where Keith is -- purportedly --- living in the desert.

(Relying on gossip makes for feeble plans, but this tidbit she overheard from the principal himself. Pidge can make an exception for staffroom chitchat. She reasons it’s got more truth behind it than the conspiracies discussed loudly in the mess hall.)

She’ll go in, get as much information as possible, and be back in the dorms an hour before wake-up at the latest. She’s not sure what she’ll do if Keith confronts her. She borrows Lance’s Swiss army knife, under the pretext of disassembling her computer, although rationally she knows that Keith could take three of her in a fight with his hands tied behind his back. More than anything the knife is a crutch.

The coordinates of Keith’s house she triangulated with a makeshift program she’d cobbled together with the help of her physics textbook and a navigator’s manual ten years out of date, from back when they still taught navigation from the ground up. In the early days, before automated software standardization, navigators wrote the programs on their own. It’s a shame, she thinks, that they did away with it. Just another thing they got wrong.

She doesn’t have much information at her disposal, only a few decades-old maps, but she’s fairly sure that she can pin down a two kilometer-squared area in which Keith’s house should be located. If she doesn’t find it she can try tracing Keith’s near-legendary speeder, but it’ll take a few nights, and there might be very unfortunate consequences should she be discovered.

\-----

Caution makes her cajole Hunk into double-checking her arithmetic. It also urges her to be secretive about it.

Pidge, by definition, is not prone to sharing, but when Hunk slides the looked-over tablet across the chrome table with an approving nod, and launches head-first into an inquiry, Pidge goes over-cautious, and feeds him a carefully nonchalant tale about a bonus assignment before slipping away.

“You’ve been taking on way too many of those bonus projects,” Hunk tells her later, over dinner. “I mean, you’ve aced that one with the triangulation, but. Ya know. Gotta slow down, relax, take some time off for yourself. I’m worried about you, Pidge.”

“Sure,” says Pidge. She never knows how to respond to pep talks. She drags the tines of her fork around her empty plate.

Lance chimes in: “Yeah, dude. You haven’t been looking too great lately. Relax, get yourself a massage or a girlfriend or something. You’ve earned it, buddy.”

“Thanks, guys,” says Pidge, and tries not to feel too guilty when Hunk offers her his slice of bread. She wishes she could tell them everything. Dishonesty does not suit her; it’s hypocrisy at best and betrayal of trust at worst, but she is learning that some things are more important than moral character, especially when the world is at stake. It kills her, it really does.

She writes the Hunk-approved coordinates onto a piece of foolscap, which she folds into quarters and stows in her shorts pocket. Alongside it she adds a printout map of the local area, taken off the school website, and a grid overlay she drew in sharpie over a translucent screen protector. Placed overtop of the map, it graphs out its universal coordinates.

Pen-and-paper is old school, but she doesn’t want to be followed. She’s taken apart countless bits of Garrison tech, and in each one she found tracker nodes, strung up along artery wires like Christmas lights. _How can you be so smart, and yet fail to do the homework?_ A teacher had asked once with a disapproving glare, after she had ignored her assignment in lieu of spending the night picking the trackers off her tablet like fleas. She can never be sure she got them all. She’s breaking half the rules in the book and then some that probably don’t exist just yet; she prefers to play it safe. She’ll leave the tablet behind.

\-----

At midnight, Pidge shucks a jacket over her shoulder and slips out of her dorm. Sneaking out is ridiculously easy, given that the Garrison’s basically a military institution, which makes her suspect that the staff at least expect it, if not outright condone it. She doesn’t like the implications of this, juxtaposed with the little trackers in the Garrison tech.

She slips past an occupied classroom and down a flight of stairs. Stairs are home-free, really, aside from the Northeast ones with their row of security cameras, nobody gives a crap what goes on in the stairwells.

Near the second floor landing she passes by a few cadets huddled around a case of beer and wraps herself tighter in her jacket. It’s best, she knows, to avoid classmates no matter the circumstances, and tonight is too important to take risks on. She walks decidedly faster until she can no longer hear their laughter.

When she hits the ground level she bypasses the showy sliding doors, which are alarmed and locked, and makes a beeline for a disused janitorial office instead. The office is no more than a glorified broom closet, but it has a window. That’s all she needs. She cranks it open and pushes out its crumbling bug screen, then swings herself over it and outside, as she’s done a thousand times before. It’s a tight fit. There are, as she’s learnt, advantages to being small.

The sky is cloudless, an unmarred expanse of indigo freckled with stars. As a navigator, Pidge can identify the constellations effortlessly; Draco, Scorpius, Apus, Ara, Hercules. She knows how to navigate by them, as well, but she opts tonight to follow her map instead. Her destination, if her calculations are correct, is farther from Galaxy Garrison than she’s ever dared to sneak out before. She begins to panic at the implications of it. _No_ \-- she can’t afford to be nervous. She wipes the thought from her mind and pushes forwards.

It’s not a precise journey, nor is it very difficult. After half an hour of walking cautiously along the scrublands and re-checking her position every so often, she reaches the summit of an elongated hill and finds herself staring down at a house-shaped shadow in the dark, exactly where her calculations indicated it should be. Dim yellow light pours out of a single boxy window.

She can see a tall, dark-haired figure moving inside. Jackpot.

\------

Pidge had given her dessert on one occasion to Keith’s former roommate, in exchange for information. Most of it was useless -- she wasn’t sure what to do with the fact that Keith listened to alt-rock, or that his favourite colour was red -- but her chocolate pudding had not been sacrificed in vain. Keith is purportedly a night owl, and is prone to sneaking out at exactly one in the morning, like clockwork.

It is, incredibly, true. Pidge never would have guessed that a boy as temperamental and unstable as Keith would follow such a meticulous schedule, but when her wristwatch blinks from 12:59 to 01:00, the door of Keith’s house creaks open.

From her strategic position behind a cluster of rocks, Pidge can see Keith step out of doorway and move towards his speeder. Keith climbs inside the vehicle. The engines begin to hum and rumble. The twin beams of the headlights flicker on and sweep over the desert, illuminating the cracked ground.

Pidge crouches lower on instinct and waits for Keith to leave. When she can no longer hear the noise of the speeder, she counts thirty more seconds, then sprints for the door.

The interior of the house smells of dust and teenage boy. She doesn’t dare turn on the lights, instead, she flicks on her pocket flashlight. Its thin beam reveals a messy room, littered with food wrappers, clothing, and crumpled papers. A tablet lying on the parquet reads off strings of numbers, accompanied by fluctuating graphs. She can’t make any sense of it. The surge of adrenaline isn’t helping.

She makes her way to a mattress shoved into the corner of the room and checks for anything of importance. There’s a heap of half-empty cups where she supposes his nightstand would be, if he had one.

One of the mugs props up a photograph of Takashi Shirogane. Her heart nearly stops in her chest.

She knows Shirogane -- or Shiro, as Matt and her father would call him -- was a Galaxy Garrison graduate as well. How did Keith know him? There’s every chance Shiro is only Keith’s idol -- if she were to suspect anyone of a harboring a celebrity crush on a supposedly tragically deceased astronaut, it would be Keith -- but taking everything into account, she has reason to hope that Keith and Shiro were related somehow. She continues searching with increasing urgency.

There’s nothing beneath the bed but a creased flannel, but inside Keith’s pillowcase Pidge finds a five-inch knife. She replaces it with shaky hands.

She wonders what it’s like to live all alone on the fringes of the desert. What it’s like to be this boy who runs from the Garrison and sleeps with a knife beneath his pillow. Where does Keith even get his food? The wrappers are generic, labelless. The scraps of paper are all scrawled over in seemingly meaningless numbers. Pidge finds herself getting frustrated. All questions, no answers.

Then her flashlight sweeps over something on the wall. Upon closer inspection it is a corkboard, buried beneath layers of paper. Strands of coloured yarn connect maps, archive photographs, shaky polaroids, newspaper clippings, computer printouts, and messy sketches. There seems to be an underlying theme of lions, and the colour blue features heavily throughout. The word Voltron, scrawled in messy red pen over and over. Energy readings -- so that’s what the tablet was displaying. Aliens. A superweapon. The side of the story she did not yet have.

In the upper corner of the corkboard is what appears to be a Garrison letter, pinned up like a ribbon. A bright red stamp indicates that the document is CONFIDENTIAL. She removes it carefully. She begins to read.

The letter itself is identical to a court transcript she downloaded off the admin files at the Garrison. It’s not very informative. But at the bottom of the page, somebody with thick, blocky handwriting has left a note:

_YOU ARE MEDDLING WITH THINGS FAR OUTSIDE THE SCOPE OF WHAT YOU CAN HANDLE. I DON’T KNOW WHO YOUR INFORMANT WAS, BUT THE BLAME IS ON YOU REGARDLESS. PACK YOUR BAGS, GET THE HELL OUT OF THE GARRISON, AND FORGET EVERYTHING YOU’VE READ ABOUT KERBEROS AND THE GALRA, OR ELSE I WILL PERSONALLY BE YOUR JUDGE AND JURY. COUNT YOURSELF LUCKY THE DAMN SYSTEM’S FULL OF COWARDS WHO WON’T LISTEN TO WHAT I SAY ABOUT UPSTART SMARTASSES. STAY OUT OF MY SIGHT AND WE CAN ALL PRETEND WE BOOTED YOU FOR BEING A LOUDMOUTH WITH AN ATTITUDE PROBLEM RATHER THAN A TRAITOR--_

Pidge hears something. A low hum. Engines.

She drops the letter and vaults for the door. She didn’t expect Keith to return so quickly. She sprints into the night, her brain a pulse of adrenaline. The shape of the Garrison is just visible over the horizon, and she knows she’ll never make it. Her only objective is to put as much distance as possible between herself and the house. Her feet kick up dust.

She’s halfway up the hill when Keith catches up. Before Keith even makes the first move, Pidge knows the fight is over. She doesn’t even bother with the knife. She barely has time to square up before Keith lands a kick straight to her solar plexus.

Objectively, it’s a very good kick. Keith is in perfect form. Subjectively, all Pidge can think of is a few choice four-letter words. She doesn’t even process the fall. The next thing she sees is the night sky.

Keith leans over her, pressing her into the ground with one knee. He pins her wrists. It’s not exactly comfortable.

“Explain yourself,” says Keith.

“My father and brother were on the Kerberos mission,” she says, breathlessly. “I’m here because I think you know something. Something about Voltron.” All her remaining dishonesty has been beaten out of her in a single blow. There’s no use in dancing around the point, not anymore.

Keith frowns, but lets go of her. She sits up.

Now that the immediate threat is gone, she takes the time to size him up. His features are blurry and indistinct in the darkness, but he is definitely the paradox of a boy who swung punches in the mess hall and meditated on the training deck. He seems to embody a sense of reckless energy paired with studied coolness. It is present in the way he leans back casually, but with both hands balled in fists.

“What do you know about the blue lion?” he asks.

“The blue lion? Nothing.”

Keith is silent for a while. He turns a rock over in his palm, a distant expression on his face. He appears to be making up his mind about something. Whether or not to confide in her, probably.

Pidge is startled. She did not expect Keith, moody, aggressive, mysterious Keith, to even consider extending an olive branch.

“Come on,” he finally says. “You should see this.”

**Author's Note:**

> I mentioned Keith's hands so often in this that the explore function on Google Drive gave me links to articles on hand-arm vibration syndrome. God strike me dead if I'm joking about this.


End file.
